So, what’s in this bag of tricks? As you read on, know that these tactics will work for you. No matter what industry you are in or whether your website is new or well-established, they will help you generate more traffic.

Here are 7 unique social media tactics that will drive you more traffic:

Tactic #1: Add tweetable quotes throughout your blog posts

One of my most popular blog posts on Quick Sprout was a post on business advice, in which I broke down business advice in 3 words.

I hate to say it, but the post wasn’t that good. The reason it did well was because I made quotes and phrases from that blog post tweetable. You could tweet every piece of advice I gave with just a click.

It was so successful that the post generated 17,452 visits from Twitter alone.

You too can do this. You’ll find that you’ll get more social media traffic from this strategy than just adding a “tweet this” button at the bottom of your blog post.

With some basic HTML, you can add this to your site. Here is an example of the code I used:

Tactic #2: Create a LinkedIn group

You may have noticed that I’ve become heavily involved with LinkedIn over the last few months. I even recently created a group called Marketing Leaders of America.

Why? Because LinkedIn is currently my number one source of social traffic. For every 5,000 members you have within your group, you can roughly generate 15,000 visitors.

You can announce your latest blog post to your entire list, just like you would with an email blast. This feature is called an “Announcement” on LinkedIn.

You only want to do such group blasts once a month, or else you will burn your group out.

You’ll notice that every time you send an announcement, you get a quick spike in traffic of a few thousand visitors. They will start sharing your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, which will generate more visitors to your site in the following 48 hours. In essence, you’ll generate 3 visitors for every group member you add, assuming you are sharing good content with the group.

This strategy has been working so well that I started buying up all of the popular marketing groups on LinkedIn.

If you are creating a group from scratch, make sure you have the word “leader” within it. Why? Because who doesn’t want to be considered a leader?

Once you create a group, invite all of your connections to join it. Then, post great content on a daily basis, and you’ll notice the number of members you have will start increasing day by day. Just make sure some of the content you publish is phrased as a question, e.g., “describe what social media means to you in 2 or fewer words.”

Tactic #3: Repost infographics with stats

When we first released the KISSmetrics blog, my business partner did something really smart.

He found good infographics from around the web and re-posted them on our blog. Sure, there is nothing unique about that, but the way he promoted each infographic was unique.

All we had to do was tweet the infographic from our account, which typically generated 20 or so re-tweets. Those re-tweets would generate further tweets, which caused a chain reaction and gave us an extra 200+ tweets.

I’ve known about this tactic for years, but I’ve rarely used it. It’s been so effective for us that I’m going to start using it again every Friday when I release infographics on Quick Sprout.

Tactic #4: Get your employees to promote your social profiles

Whether you have your own company or you work for one, chances are you work with other people. So, why not leverage everyone’s social profiles to promote the business?

My co-founder as well as my team members do this with their profiles on Twitter. As you can see, we mention our company’s @username within our bios.

We also do this with our Facebook fan pages. Every person of our company joins them. Why? Because they are more likely to “like” something that comes from the company they work for versus a random piece of content.

This causes our engagement-per-fan ratio to skyrocket, which helps increase the number of people who see our company’s content within their feeds. It’s been so effective that it helped us generate an extra 19% more visits from Facebook, which isn’t too bad considering we don’t even have 100 employees within our company.

Tactic #5: Tweet for an e-book

Whether you are releasing a white paper or an e-book, a great way to generate more downloads is to make users pay with a tweet. If they want to read the material you are offering, they’ll have to tweet it.

We tested this with a white paper on sales. We asked users to either give us their email addresses or tweet about the white paper in order to read it. We’ve also tested this approach with dozens of e-books.

We used a service called Pay with a Tweet as I have little to no development skills. The results so far have been pretty good. For every 5 people that tweeted about the white paper, we got 3 additional tweets from people seeing it on Twitter.

If you want to generate more traffic from Twitter, consider creating an e-book or a guide and making your users pay with a tweet. It’s an effective strategy, and you’ll find that people won’t have an issue tweeting about your business.

You already know that offering a free e-book or a guide in exchange for an email address is a great way to collect them. You can use opt-in fields in your sidebar or beneath your blog posts, or you can test pop-ups.

But one thing you probably haven’t played with is collecting email addresses using Facebook authentication. Through Aweber, your visitors can give their email addresses with a click of a button, assuming they are logged into Facebook.

The Facebook authentication tactic helped increase our opt-in rate by 36.1% when we tested it on the KISSmetrics blog. If you are interested in leveraging this tactic, just follow the steps in this blog post.

Tactic #7: Leverage influencers

One of the best strategies I’ve used to build a blog audience is interviewing influencers. Every niche has its own experts.

If you can interview these experts, get their feedback on one issue, and then publish a giant blog post with their opinions, you’ll get more social shares than ever before.

Here is what you need to do:

Create a list of over 100 experts in your space. Not everyone will participate, but your goal should be to get at least 50 people to accept.

Come up with a question to ask these experts. Each expert should receive the same question.

Email 10 experts asking them if they would like to participate in a group roundup. Make sure you give them a deadline for their responses. Let them know that you will link to their websites.

After you have a few experts who are on board, email the rest. When emailing the rest of the group, make sure you mention the names of the people who are already planning on participating. This will help increase your response rate.

Once you’ve published your post, make sure you email all of the participants asking them to share the post on the major social networks. Make it easy for them by giving them suggestions on what to tweet or share on Facebook.

Buy $100 in StumbleUpon ads. This will help you generate traffic to your post and cause people to click through to the experts’ sites. Your website will show up as a “referrer” in their analytics, which will encourage your experts to share your content on the social web further.

That’s all it takes to leverage influencers. It’s not rocket science. It’s just time consuming. If you want to see a good example of this, check out this blog post.

Conclusion

I rarely share my bag of tricks. I hope you’ll leverage these ones because they work. None of these tactics require a developer, so you should be able to do them on your own. 🙂

Give them a whirl, and let me know what you think. If you are having a hard time leveraging any of them, leave a comment, and I’ll be glad to help you out.

If you’re giving away ebooks and whitepapers, putting click-to-tweet links in your premium content can be a big win, too. It’s a way to let people share a snippet of the premium content they enjoy, and send their friends to your landing page to experience it themselves.

Great advice as always. I’ve got to say that adding tweetable quotes throughout posts has proved really successful for me. Leveraging influencers is also a great way to drive more traffic and get yourself known, just make sure you go about it the right way and don’t come across as needy or spammy.

I love the idea of interviewing influencers. Except it’s getting them to share on FB is what gets me……..even the “experts” in the field my blog is in say silly stuff like, oh, I don’t think my FB friends would be interested and just don’t want to share. Getting them to want to share on social media is a holdup for me. And it’s their own work and if it wasn’t good I wouldn’t publish it all!!! So people are weird. Oh well. I guess I knew that.

great list Neil, thx a lot for sharing. love the idea to tweet parts of your post idea as well the info graphic sharing.

i had some great success before in doing a “best of” blog post, listing many blogs from a certain niche. i made sure to let each blog owner know about this post and they were more than happy to share this on their social media accounts. they also generated a lot of backlinks 🙂

How about leveling up the 1 point, and making the tweetable quote into an image – quotegraphic, and then letting people tweet, pin that one etc. Might be way better. Power of visual social media? I’d bet it would increase shares! 🙂

Unless I missed my guess, it’s becoming a new hot trend and keyword ‘visual social media’ so if you got stats, it would be a great topic to write about on QS! There is still new content needed there. I think.

Luke, glad you found the post helpful.
I think it all depends on who you are targeting, what your audience looks like and other variables. You can definitely promote YT videos. That has been a great source of traffic for people traditionally.

Implementing tweets into content is a cool idea. I would like to try this on my site as well. You might have also mentioned something about sharing buttons on images as well. When hovered on the image its good to have social buttons for sharing. Tip from me as well 🙂

Always great stuff Neil, but I take issue with one tiny sentence: “This strategy has been working so well that I started buying up all of the popular marketing groups on LinkedIn.” Do you mean to say you’ve made private deals with the group owners to take over the group in exchange for a payment? Does this not violate LinkedIn’s user rule about not monetizing groups?

Hi Neil, I always love to read you all articles, it really helps me a lot. Now I am an addicted to your ideas to implement. Everytime when I need any help with regards to the SEO, I prefer quicksprout for the same. Thanks a ton!

Great post! I have been trying/wanting to leverage #4 – get your employees involved. Unfortunately we deal with a lot of law-related work and employees don’t even want to like or follow the social media profiles I have set up because clients could find them or they could be liable for something they post or etc., etc. So I can’t seem to get our profiles really going.. I know the employee follower aspect is huge but I am just not going to get them. Do you have any ideas regarding this? Thank you so much!

Hi Neil, great post. I’m struggling to find 10 let alone 100 influencers in niche. My audience are management accounting students taking professional exams but they don’t really follow tutors or colleges on social media or read blogs on the topics they are learning. Any advice?

What a great set of processes that even the non savvy can do. Neil your blog is an inspiration matey. Would love to get you to visit Cumbria and do a session with the Growth Hub folks here in Cumbria – sadly you’re way out of our league! 😉

Being all over influencers is simply the way to go. Make friends with them. Connect with them. In time, after you’ve interviewed them, or helped them by sharing their stuff on social networks, you’ll come up on their radar and you’ll find them promoting you or asking you for interviews.

I was featured on over 20 well-known blogs in the past 8 weeks by connecting with influencers. Nothing I did was groundbreaking. I promoted pros.

I posted thorough comments on top blogs like yours, Neil. Social requests flowed in to me in the proportion to which I helped folks – from a detached place – and of course, I had a neat story to tell to.

Using these practical tips while keeping the Golden Rule in mind drives traffic. Help others drive their traffic, and connect with leaders to leverage your presence quickly.

I figure that if I help a bunch of pros out, and detach from outcomes, goodness will flow back to me. Works so well

Neil, good post – but I feel like I have already read this stuff a million times before. Everyone is saying the same! And i’m getting a bit bored. When I first started out with digital marketing I made it a point to read all of your blogs as soon as they came through.. now i’m inclined not to bother. You’re a thought leader, not a follower, please keep that up!

I just opened an email and get a notification from you. Again – again the article surprised me. very helpful article.
I usually use facebook to add visitors. And this is true – really works well.
And once I get a commission from amazon that came from facebook (not directly from facebook, but visitors to the website is my first point and finally going on sale).

Hi Neil,
I’ve been quietly reading your posts, and thinking how I can apply your ideas to international development, specifically government transparency, accountability and civic engagement issues around the world.

This post in particular sparked so many ideas about what we could do to mobilize “netizens”, civil society organizations and other groups…

I hope I get to meet you some day. Your posts are really generous and appreciated from someone who doesn’t come from the business world, and trying to adapt some ideas to the public interest/governance field.

Neil, I’ve gotta say–every time I read one of your blog posts, it takes me an hour.

Not because a 2,000 word post takes an hour to read, but because your tips are so valuable, that I end up reading all your linked articles, taking notes (in Evernote) for all the new things I want to try, and I barely finish the post because I’m so busy setting up something you talked about in the beginning.

These are some wonderful tricks you’ve shared with us! You’re constantly teaching us something new.

I’ve implemented most of these tips you shared (my “Top blog quotes by 101 amazing bloggers (and one by me)” post implemented tactics #1 and #7), but one of your tips really intrigues me… the LinkedIn group.

I have yet to do anything with LinkedIn. I have an account, but it’s not even tied to my blog in any way, shape or form. Sad isn’t it?

This sounds like a good weekend project for me. Thanks for the tip, Neil. And for all your tips!

I am truly glad that I found this post. Simply LOVE the way you wrote this and explained things beautifully. I too belong to the same niche just like you and handling social media for a health website. Need your help regarding how to improve social traffic for such health websites.

I really loved the way of “Pay with a tweet”. Generally, many people are reluctant to provide their email address as they have the fear of spam.. But “Pay with a tweet ” method can truly drive an ultimate traffic from twitter.

Neil, the stuff you share is golden. I recently listened to your interview with pat Flynn twice to make sure I understood what you shared. Really love this article and I’m definitely going to be going through your guide books.

The design you have for them is frigging amazing and makes them so much more enjoyable to read.

This is a very useful information. To know this etiquette in using a social media is very important especially people nowadays are active in using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+. I would like to thank the article contributor for this post.

I’ve been considering this approach. Its better that sharing all at once as ppl are on at various times. So not everyone sees plus with social media always changing…I will be implementing this and a weekly roundup of the week…so its fresh content…old news…and email to subscibers. Thks for the inspiration!

Very thankful for all of your great ideas on blogging and driving traffic. I’ve been consistent with applying your rules. How long do you think it should take to build good traffic with these ideas?Boost traffic